George Orwell's 1984 -- Chapter 7
Chapter 7
If
there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming
disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force
to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from
within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or
even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as
just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever
assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the
eyes, an inflexion of the voice, at the most, an occasional whispered word. But
the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength.
would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake
themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the
Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them
to do it? And yet-!
He
remembered how once he had been walking down a crowded street when a tremendous
shout of hundreds of voices women's voices — had burst from a side-street a
little way ahead. It was a great formidable cry of anger and despair, a deep,
loud 'Oh-o-o-o-oh!' that went humming on like the reverberation of a bell. His
heart had leapt. It's started! he had thought. A riot! The proles are breaking
loose at last! When he had reached the spot it was to see a mob of two or three
hundred women crowding round the stalls of a street market, with faces as
tragic as though they had been the doomed passengers on a sinking ship. But at
this moment the general despair broke down into a multitude of individual
quarrels. It appeared that one of the stalls had been selling tin saucepans.
They were wretched, flimsy things, but cooking-pots of any kind were always
difficult to get. Now the supply had unexpectedly given out. The successful
women, bumped and jostled by the rest, were trying to make off with their
saucepans while dozens of others clamoured round the stall, accusing the
stall-keeper of favouritism and of having more saucepans somewhere in reserve.
There was a fresh outburst of yells. Two bloated women, one of them with her
hair coming down, had got hold of the same saucepan and were trying to tear it
out of one another's hands. For a moment they were both tugging, and then the
handle came off. Winston watched them disgustedly. And yet, just for a moment,
what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred
throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that
mattered?
He
wrote:
Until
they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled
they cannot become conscious.
That,
he reflected, might almost have been a transcription from one of the Party
textbooks. The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from
bondage. Before the Revolution they had been hideously oppressed by the
capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women had been forced to work
in the coal mines (women still did work in the coal mines, as a matter of
fact), children had been sold into the factories at the age of six. But
simultaneously, true to the Principles of doublethink, the Party taught that
the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals,
by the application of a few simple rules. In reality very little was known
about the proles. It was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued
to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to
themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had
reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of
ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to
work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and
sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they
died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and
children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all,
gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not
difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading
false rumours and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were
judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate
them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that the proles
should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a
primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to
make them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations. And even when they
became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere,
because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific
grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice. The great
majority of proles did not even have telescreens in their homes. Even the civil
police interfered with them very little. There was a vast amount of criminality
in London, a whole world- within-a-world of thieves, bandits, prostitutes,
drug-peddlers, and racketeers of every description; but since it all happened
among the proles themselves, it was of no importance. In all questions of
morals they were allowed to follow their ancestral code. The sexual puritanism
of the Party was not imposed upon them. Promiscuity went unpunished, divorce
was permitted. For that matter, even religious worship would have been
permitted if the proles had shown any sign of needing or wanting it. They were
beneath suspicion. As the Party slogan put it: 'Proles and animals are free.'
Winston
reached down and cautiously scratched his varicose ulcer. It had begun itching
again. The thing you invariably came back to was the impossibility of knowing
what life before the Revolution had really been like. He took out of the drawer
a copy of a children's history textbook which he had borrowed from Mrs Parsons,
and began copying a passage into the diary:
In
the old days (it ran), before the glorious Revolution, London was not the
beautiful city that we know today. It was a dark, dirty, miserable place where
hardly anybody had enough to eat and where hundreds and thousands of poor
people had no boots on their feet and not even a roof to sleep under. Children
no older than you had to work twelve hours a day for cruel masters who flogged
them with whips if they worked too slowly and fed them on nothing but stale
breadcrusts and water.
But
in among all this terrible poverty there were just a few great big beautiful
houses that were lived in by rich men who had as many as thirty servants to
look after them. These rich men were called capitalists. They were fat, ugly
men with wicked faces, like the one in the picture on the opposite page. You
can see that he is dressed in a long black coat which was called a frock coat,
and a queer, shiny hat shaped like a stovepipe, which was called a top hat.
This was the uniform of the capitalists, and no one else was allowed to wear
it. The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their
slave. They owned all the land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the
money. If anyone disobeyed them they could throw them into prison, or they
could take his job away and starve him to death. When any ordinary person spoke
to a capitalist he had to cringe and bow to him, and take off his cap and
address him as 'Sir'. The chief of all the capitalists was called the King. and
But
he knew the rest of the catalogue. There would be mention of the bishops in
their lawn sleeves, the judges in their ermine robes, the pillory, the stocks,
the treadmill, the cat-o'-nine tails, the Lord Mayor's Banquet, and the
practice of kissing the Pope's toe. There was also something called the jus
primae noctis, which would probably not be mentioned in a textbook for
children. It was the law by which every capitalist had the right to sleep with
any woman working in one of his factories.
How
could you tell how much of it was lies? It might be true that the average human
being was better off now than he had been before the Revolution. The only
evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the
instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that
at some other time they must have been different. It struck him that the truly
characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but
simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life, if you looked about
you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the
telescreens, but even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve. Great
areas of it, even for a Party member, were neutral and non-political, a matter
of slogging through dreary jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube, darning a
worn-out sock, cadging a saccharine tablet, saving a cigarette end. The ideal
set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering — a world of
steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons — a nation of
warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same
thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting,
triumphing, persecuting — three hundred million people all with the same face.
The reality was decaying, dingy cities where underfed people shuffled to and
fro in leaky shoes, in patched- up nineteenth-century houses that smelt always
of cabbage and bad lavatories. He seemed to see a vision of London, vast and
ruinous, city of a million dustbins, and mixed up with it was a picture of Mrs
Parsons, a woman with lined face and wispy hair, fiddling helplessly with a
blocked waste-pipe.
He
reached down and scratched his ankle again. Day and night the telescreens
bruised your ears with statistics proving that people today had more food, more
clothes, better houses, better recreations — that they lived longer, worked
shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger, happier, more intelligent,
better educated, than the people of fifty years ago. Not a word of it could
ever be proved or disproved. The Party claimed, for example, that today 40 per
cent of adult proles were literate: before the Revolution, it was said, the
number had only been 15 per cent. The Party claimed that the infant mortality
rate was now only 160 per thousand, whereas before the Revolution it had been
300 — and so it went on. It was like a single equation with two unknowns. It
might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things
that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy. For all he knew there
might never have been any such law as the jus primae noctis, or any such
creature as a capitalist, or any such garment as a top hat.
Everything
faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became
truth. Just once in his life he had possessed — after the event: that was what
counted — concrete, unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification. He had
held it between his fingers for as long as thirty seconds. In 1973, it must
have been — at any rate, it
was at about the time when he and Katharine had parted. But the really relevant
date was seven or eight years earlier.
The
story really began in the middle sixties, the period of the great purges in
which the original leaders of the Revolution were wiped out once and for all.
By 1970 none of them was left, except Big Brother himself. All the rest had by
that time been exposed as traitors and counter- revolutionaries. Goldstein had
fled and was hiding no one knew where, and of the others, a few had simply
disappeared, while the majority had been executed after spectacular public
trials at which they made confession of their crimes. Among the last survivors
were three men named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. It must have been in 1965
that these three had been arrested. As often happened, they had vanished for a
year or more, so that one did not know whether they were alive or dead, and
then had suddenly been brought forth to incriminate themselves in the usual
way. They had confessed to intelligence with the enemy (at that date, too, the
enemy was Eurasia), embezzlement of public funds, the murder of various trusted
Party members, intrigues against the leadership of Big Brother which had
started long before the Revolution happened, and acts of sabotage causing the
death of hundreds of thousands of people. After confessing to these things they
had been pardoned, reinstated in the Party, and given posts which were in fact
sinecures but which sounded important. All three had written long, abject
articles in The Times, analysing the reasons for their defection and promising
to make amends.
Some
time after their release Winston had actually seen all three of them in the
Chestnut Tree Cafe. He remembered the sort of terrified fascination with which
he had watched them out of the corner of his eye. They were men far older than
himself, relics of the ancient world, almost the last great figures left over
from the heroic days of the Party. The glamour of the underground struggle and
the civil war still faintly clung to them. He had the feeling, though already
at that time facts and dates were growing blurry, that he had known their names
years earlier than he had known that of Big Brother. But also they were
outlaws, enemies, untouchables, doomed with absolute certainty to extinction
within a year or two. No one who had once fallen into the hands of the Thought
Police ever escaped in the end. They were corpses waiting to be sent back to
the grave.
There
was no one at any of the tables nearest to them. It was not wise even to be
seen in the neighbourhood of such people. They were sitting in silence before
glasses of the gin flavoured with cloves which was the speciality of the cafe.
Of the three, it was Rutherford whose appearance had most impressed Winston.
Rutherford had once been a famous caricaturist, whose brutal cartoons had
helped to inflame popular opinion before and during the Revolution. Even now,
at long intervals, his cartoons were appearing in The Times. They were simply
an imitation of his earlier manner, and curiously lifeless and unconvincing.
Always they were a rehashing of the ancient themes — slum tenements, starving
children, street battles, capitalists in top hats — even on the barricades the
capitalists still seemed to cling to their top hats an endless, hopeless effort
to get back into the past. He was a monstrous man, with a mane of greasy grey
hair, his face pouched and seamed, with thick negroid lips. At one time he must
have been immensely strong; now his great body was sagging, sloping, bulging,
falling away in every direction. He seemed to be breaking up before one's eyes,
like a mountain crumbling.
It
was the lonely hour of fifteen. Winston could not now remember how he had come
to be in the cafe at such a time. The place was almost empty. A tinny music was
trickling from the telescreens. The three men sat in their corner almost
motionless, never speaking. Uncommanded, the waiter brought fresh glasses of
gin. There was a chessboard on the table beside them, with the pieces set out
but no game started. And then, for perhaps half a minute in all, something
happened to the telescreens. The tune that they were playing changed, and the
tone of the music changed too. There came into it — but it was something hard
to describe. It was a peculiar, cracked, braying, jeering note: in his mind
Winston called it a yellow note. And then a voice from the telescreen was
singing:
Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you
sold me: There lie they, and here lie we Under the spreading chestnut tree.
The
three men never stirred. But when Winston glanced again at Rutherford's
ruinous face, he saw that his eyes were full of tears. And for the first time
he noticed, with a kind of inward shudder, and yet not knowing at what he
shuddered, that both Aaronson and Rutherford had broken noses.
A
little later all three were re-arrested. It appeared that they had engaged in
fresh conspiracies from the very moment of their release. At their second trial
they confessed to all their old crimes over again, with a whole string of new
ones. They were executed, and their fate was recorded in the Party histories, a
warning to posterity. About five years after this, in 1973, Winston was
unrolling a wad of documents which had just flopped out of the pneumatic tube
on to his desk when he came on a fragment of paper which had evidently been
slipped in among the others and then forgotten. The instant he had flattened it
out he saw its significance. It was a half-page torn out of The Times of about
ten years earlier — the top half of the page, so that it included the date —
and it contained a photograph of the delegates at some Party function in New
York. Prominent in the middle of the group were Jones, Aaronson, and
Rutherford. There was no mistaking them, in any case their names were in the
caption at the bottom.
The
point was that at both trials all three men had confessed that on that date
they had been on Eurasian soil. They had flown from a secret airfield in Canada
to a rendezvous somewhere in Siberia, and had conferred with members of the
Eurasian General Staff, to whom they had betrayed important military secrets.
The date had stuck in Winston's memory because it chanced to be midsummer day;
but the whole story must be on record in countless other places as well. There
was only one possible conclusion: the confessions were lies.
Of
course, this was not in itself a discovery. Even at that time Winston had not
imagined that the people who were wiped out in the purges had actually committed
the crimes that they were accused of. But this was concrete evidence; it was a
fragment of the abolished past, like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong
stratum and destroys a geological theory. It was enough to blow the Party to
atoms, if in some way it could have been published to the world and its
significance made known.
He
had gone straight on working. As soon as he saw what the photograph was, and
what it meant, he had covered it up with another sheet of paper. Luckily, when
he unrolled it, it had been upside-down from the point of view of the
telescreen.
He
took his scribbling pad on his knee and pushed back his chair so as to get as
far away from the telescreen as possible. To keep your face expressionless was
not difficult, and even your breathing could be controlled, with an effort: but
you could not control the beating of your heart, and the telescreen was quite
delicate enough to pick it up. He let what he judged to be ten minutes go by,
tormented all the while by the fear that some accident — a sudden draught
blowing across his desk, for instance — would betray him. Then, without
uncovering it again, he dropped the photograph into the memory hole, along with
some other waste papers. Within another minute, perhaps, it would have crumbled
into ashes.
That
was ten — eleven years ago. Today, probably, he would have kept that
photograph. It was curious that the fact of having held it in his fingers
seemed to him to make a difference even now, when the photograph itself, as
well as the event it recorded, was only memory. Was the Party's hold upon the
past less strong, he wondered, because a piece of evidence which existed no
longer had once existed?
But
today, supposing that it could be somehow resurrected from its ashes, the
photograph might not even be evidence. Already, at the time when he made his
discovery, Oceania was no longer at war with Eurasia, and it must have been to
the agents of Eastasia that the three dead men had betrayed their country.
Since then there had been other changes — two, three, he could not remember how
many. Very likely the confessions had been rewritten and rewritten until the
original facts and dates no longer had the smallest significance. The past not
only changed, but changed continuously. What most afflicted him with the sense
of nightmare was that he had never clearly understood why the huge imposture
was undertaken. The immediate advantages of falsifying the past were obvious,
but the ultimate motive was mysterious. He took up his pen again and wrote:
I
understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.
He
wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a
lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had
been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun; today, to
believe that the past is inalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief,
and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not
greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be wrong.
He
picked up the children's history book and looked at the portrait of Big Brother which
formed its frontispiece. The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though
some huge force were pressing down upon you — something that penetrated inside
your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs,
persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the
Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe
it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the
logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but
the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy.
The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they
would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after
all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity
works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external
world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then?
But
no! His courage seemed suddenly to stiffen of its own accord. The face of
O'Brien, not called up by any obvious association, had floated into his mind.
He knew, with more certainty than before, that O'Brien was on his side. He was
writing the diary for O'Brien — to O'Brien: it was like an interminable letter
which no one would ever read, but which was addressed to a particular person
and took its colour from that fact.
The
Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their
final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous
power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would
overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to
understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and
he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended.
Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change.
Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth's
centre. With the feeling that he was speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was
setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:
Freedom
is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else
follows.
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